Course Library
Browse our library of planning courses
Location Optimization
This course introduces the basic principles of location optimization models and provides a hands-on tutorial on point-based location optimization using QGIS and LINGO.
Tableau for Planners 3: Dashboards
This course will expand on the Tableau for Planners: Introduction and Worksheets. Students will have prior experience will building basic tables and will start to use Tableau to build multi-worksheet dashboards with interactive controls like filtering. Students will also learn how to make the data used in their visualization accessible to the public. At the end of the course, we will demonstrate how to publish the work to Tableau Public and embed dashboards on websites and in social media.
Tableau for Planners 2: Worksheets
This course will expand on the Tableau for Planners: Introduction course. This course continues to train the planner on how to build effective worksheets for planners. This course will introduce general principles of data visualization and orient the user with the Tableau platform, with a primary focus on Tableau Public, a free version of Tableau's desktop software.
Tableau for Planners: Introduction
This course will introduce general principles of data visualization and orient the user with the Tableau platform. Learn how to connect to a data set in Microsoft Excel, understand general principles of a relational database, and start building basic worksheets and dashboards.
Urban Design for Planners 3: Neighborhoods and Centers
This course demonstrates how to delineate a set of neighborhoods and neighborhood centers for a given area and suggests design improvements that enhance neighborhood centers.
Urban Design for Planners 2: Getting Started with QGIS and SketchUp
Course instructor Emily Talen guides viewers through the process of transferring a shapefile of building outlines into SketchUp and processes of basic manipulation necessary to create a 3D model. Learn how to load data into QGIS, set the coordinate reference system, and change the graphic display of data layers.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
Urban planners and urban designers are interested in building places that embody beauty and hope. In this course, Emily Talen, PhD, FAICP, presents free urban design software tools that can help urban planners and urban designers visualize changes in the built environment to support the overarching goal of creating better places.
The DIY Form-Based Code: Research and Development
Covering concepts critical to developing the foundation for a code, this course takes a a tour through the creation of a code for the hypothetical city of Wrightville.
Geoanalysis with ArcGIS and Google Earth
Combining ArcGIS and Google Earth allows for a convenient, powerful way to create and share professional, accurate spatial visualizations of geographical analysis to a wide audience. This course explores how to prep shape files for ingestion into Google Earth, share city data with the public, and aid in pre-visualizing via geo-referencing around potential development sites.
Gephi for Network Analysis and Visualization
Network Analysis helps urban planners, designers, and policy makers explore the dynamics and complexities of social networks and organizations. This course demonstrates the ways you can use the open-source Gephi software to visualize and analyze online social networks.
GIS Walkability Modeling
As the field of planning continues to trend toward multi-modal, sustainable transportation practices, tools to model or analyze the walkability of a given area have grown in number and complexity. In this course, students will learn how to apply ArcMap and the Spatial Analyst extension to model walkability. The course assumes students have a working knowledge of GIS and basic familiarity with Spatial Analyst.